Phantom links to me?

[Violet]

I occasionally get a random site in my stats that has apparently brought viewers to my site, but when I check it out, I cannot find a link and they often don't seem like the kind of site that would have a reason to link to me. Sometimes, they are not in English so it is hard to tell what is going on.

Can anyone shed any light on this? Are people advertising now by making a link to my site and luring me to check out their site? Am I being used in some way?

Thanks,
Violet

[Joseph]

Are people advertising now by making a link to my site and luring me to check out their site? Am I being used in some way?
Exactly. :yeah:

It's called "Referrer Spam" - and it's nasty. The spammers are trying to either A) Get you to click the link in your stats or B) get their link in any public stats you have on your site (CMS/Blog/Unprotected /stats directory/etc)

As you are seeing some referrer, it's VERY important that you password protect your "/stats/" directory (very simple to do via the CNC) if it isn't already protected (it will be protected by default if your account was setup within the last two years).

This type of spam is not only annoying, but can cause the server some trouble as well. They are actually making requests to the server for the content, and usually doing so in very large numbers in a very short time frame. Thus causing the server to load/create the entire page (not so bad for static content, but can be worse with dynamic content) many times quickly.

How to stop it? Well, that's a big question right now with no good answer. If you see a particular IP address showing up a few times, you can block it with a .htaccess file, but that's not very effective as they (the spammers) usually have many IPs and can get more if you block all of them. :sad:

At this point, just don't click on the links. Hopefully they won't see you as a good source of traffic so they'll leave you alone...

[Violet]

Thanks! That is good to know. I have been copying the links and pasting them into a new window, rather than clicking on them (I am the suspicious type!). Hopefully there is no harm done.

[cindik]

One of the things I do with referrers I don't recognize is to copy the url and paste it into the browser, rather than clicking. This prevents them from seeing my stats as a referrer, so they know not how I got the address. I can then determine whether it's a "real" referrer or a spammer.

[letterexchange]

Hi. I've had my stats protected for several months, and verified it by going to \stats and being prompted for the user and password, and still I'm getting so much of this garbage that my referrer list is close to useless, at least it's extremely hard to use. Is there something else I need to do?